gvim

Emacs

?Emacs. Some people think it is a mutated and bloated Lisp system trying to disguise itself as a text editor. However, today it is fast enough and once some commands have been learned it is quite powerful. Furthermore, there are auto-indent and syntax highlighting options for many file formats such as programming languages or ?LaTeX, and config files such as ~/.muttrc and ~/.procmailrc. If you know Lisp, you can customize Emacs to any extent you like. I would advise to stick to verstion 20.x, since the 21.x -versions contain unneeded and annoying graphical "improvements" (on the other hand, there are ways to turn these "improvements" off; see "Notes"). In Debian, a version of ?emacs is installed by default.

Alternatywa

For those who find vi cryptic and emacs ugly or confusing, there are a variety of alternatives. "jed" (or "xjed") is a full-featured emacs-like editor with colour support menus, etc. Note, the testing release is much improved over the version in potato.